Sunday, October 28, 2012

Tales for Future Times:

Although much
lesser known than his literary heirs the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian
Andersen, the seventeenth-century French writer Charles Perrault not only
solidified the fairy tale as a literary genre, but wrote or adapted nearly all
of the genre’s most signature stories, his tales entering the culture in ways
that far transcend his own personal artistic reach. “Cinderella,” “Sleeping
Beauty,” Little Red Riding Hood,” Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Tom Thumb,” and
the larger designation of “Mother Goose” stories all permeate virtually every
level of modern art and entertainment, from rock songs to popular films to the
most sophisticated stories and novels by such literary fabulists as Angela
Carter and Margaret Atwood. With all these tales forming a common cultural
currency, the clarity and intent of the originals has often been either
obscured or contorted to serve sometimes questionable meanings, and while a
film such as 1996’s Freeway creates a brilliant and necessary twist on
the “Little Red Riding Hood” story, many more popular versions of Perrault’s
works—from the saccharine Disney films to the grotesquely insulting Pretty
Woman—manipulate their audiences by promoting reactionary gender and class
stereotypes. Much of this is in the originals, though, and it’s often
surprising to see just what is and what isn’t in Charles Perrault’s versions of
these seminal fairy tales.

Perrault published his Stories or
Tales from TimesPast (subtitled Mother Goose Tales) in 1697,
the work comprising three of his earlier verse stories and eight new prose tales,
and arriving at the end of a long and not entirely satisfying literary life—Perrault
was nearly seventy, and while he was well-connected, his contributions had been
more intellectual than artistic—this slim volume achieved a success that hadn’t
seemed possible to the man who’d long made his main living as a civil servant.
Some of the stories were adapted from oral tradition, and some were inspired by
episodes from earlier works, including Boccaccio’s The Decameron and
Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and some were inventions wholly new to
Perrault, but what was most significantly new was the idea of turning magical
folk tales into sophisticated and subtle forms of written literature. While we
now think of fairy tales as primarily children’s literature, there was no such
thing as children’s literature in Perrault’s time, and with this in mind we
can see that the “morals” of these tales take on more worldly purposes, despite
their slyly clever packaging within the fantastical universe of fairies and
ogres and talking animals.

Philippe Lallemand’s portrait ofCharles Perrault (detail), 1672

In “Puss in Boots,” the youngest of
three sons inherits only a cat when his father dies, but through the cat’s wily
scheming the young man ends up wealthy and married to a princess. Perrault, who
was in favor with Louis XIV, provides two interconnected but competing morals
to the tale, and he clearly had the machinations of the court in mind with this
witty satire. On the one hand, the tale promotes the idea of using hard work
and ingenuity to get ahead rather than just relying on your parents’ money, but
on the other hand it warns against being taken in by pretenders who may have
achieved their wealth in unscrupulous ways. Thus, a tale that seems like a
didactic children’s fable actually serves as a double-edged send-up of class
mobility, such as it existed in the seventeenth century.

Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”
reads much like the popularized versions that we all grew up with, but with one
big difference: The wolf eats the girl and her grandmother, and nobody comes
along to save them. Without the happy ending, which the Brothers Grimm supply
in their version, the story serves as a warning to young women against talking
to strangers, and in its moral it warns even more strongly against the “charming”
wolves who seem civilized but who are perhaps even more dangerous than brutish
attackers. There’s no heroic male to slay the wolf and save Little Red Riding
Hood from her own gullible innocence; there’s only danger, and it’s up to young
women to learn how to recognize it.

Like “Puss in Boots,” Perrault’s
“Cinderella” also has two competing and contradictory morals, and they likewise
discuss questions of marriageability and class connection. One moral claims
that charm is more important than looks when it comes to winning a man’s heart,
an idea that suggests that anyone can achieve happiness, regardless of their
conventional assets. But the second moral declares that no matter what natural
gifts you have, you need a godfather or godmother in order to put them to good
use, a message that acknowledges—and perhaps supports—society’s profoundly
uneven playing field.

Catherine Deneuve in the film version of Donkey Skin, 1970

The most strange and amazing of
Perrault’s tales, “Donkey Skin,” is also one of his least known, probably
because its shocking grotesqueries have no way of being watered down and made
easily palatable. In the story a dying queen asks her husband to remarry after
her death, but only to a princess even more beautiful than she. Eventually the
king’s own daughter grows to surpass her dead mother’s beauty, and the king
falls deeply in love with her. At the suggestion of her fairy godmother, the
princess makes seemingly impossible demands of the king in exchange for her hand,
and the king somehow fulfils her demands each time, to both shimmering and
terrifying effect. Then she demands the skin of the king’s magic donkey, which
defecates gold coins and is the source of the kingdom’s wealth. Even this the
king does, and so the princess flees, wearing the donkey skin as a permanent
disguise. In Cinderella-like fashion, a young prince rescues her from her
squalor and marries her, and events transpire so that her father also ends up
happily paired with a neighboring widow-queen. Despite the tidiness of all its
ends, this is the story that contains the messiest and wildest of Perrault’s
invented worlds, and perhaps this is why posterity has been unable to tame it
into a version that it feels comfortable presenting to children. There is
no Disney version, but for the adventurous, Jacques Demy’s 1970 film starring
Catherine Deneuve manages to capture all of the story’s perversity while
casting the loveliest and most magical spell on its viewers.

While Perrault’s original tales are
hardly the versions that were fed to us as children, they also can’t be
expected to be the feminist and socialist alternate versions that we might wish
them to be—see Angela Carter’s 1979 story collection The Bloody Chamber for
this kind of modern twist; Carter had translated an edition of Perrault’s fairy
tales in 1977 and was inspired to create her own versions as a response.
Perrault was an upper-class intellectual during the reign of the Sun King, and
unlike the fable-writer Jean de La Fontaine, whose rich narratives often
criticized the powerful and took the side of the underdog—and who himself was
not in favor with the megalomaniacal Louis Quatorze—Perrault didn’t have much
of an interest in rocking the boat. Instead, as a leading figure on the modern
side of the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,” he brought new forms and
sources to literature to create something that even the ancients had never
seen. La Fontaine was on the side of the ancients and wrote fables in the vein
of Aesop, and while La Fontaine was much more intellectually clever and
lyrically sophisticated, it was Perrault’s modernity that lay the foundation
for a new kind of literature that’s created a culture all its own. Perrault may
have been writing for adults, but the fairy tales that he first put on paper
spawned a revolution in what kinds of stories could be made into literature,
and soon writing for children spread throughout Europe and eventually across
the rest of the world. The results—and even his own works—may have gone far out
of Perrault’s intent or control, but that’s what often happens when you
introduce something new into the world. It seems that there’s a moral somewhere
in that.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Nameless:

In the earlier
Middle Ages, before Dante ushered in the cult of the poet as the center of the
universe, sagas and epics were almost always anonymous, because they narrated
ostensibly true events that the author couldn’t claim to be the “author” of.
Great epics such as Beowulf and The Song of Roland and El Cid
all recounted heroic deeds that were common cultural and historical currency
and that had been told by countless earlier poets, sometimes over the course of
centuries. Poets often contended with earlier versions in an attempt to
supersede them, but custom demanded that they as authors remain nameless, even
in triumph. Perhaps the greatest of these anonymous epics, The
Nibelungenlied (or The Song of the Nibelungs), came at a pivotal
shift in poetic modes, when the brutal histories that it recounts needed to be
tempered to an age of courtly chivalry, creating a strange and complex web of
narrative priorities and strategies.

The author worked in a court somewhere
in Austria at around the year 1200, and while his finely attuned courtly
sensibilities made for a more sophisticated and nuanced work of art (paving the
way for the likes of Dante), it’s clearly the poem’s outrageous contents that
have assured its lasting appeal. In addition to fusing old and new artistic
modes, The Nibelungenlied sews together two major narratives, and
although it largely holds as a single piece, the seams show quite clearly. The
first major part of the poem covers a period thought to be the early fifth
century, narrating the marriages of Siegfried to Kriemhild and Gunther to
Brünhild. In brief, the Burgundian King Gunther has a beautiful sister named
Kriemhild, and a traveling warrior prince named Siegfried wants to marry her. In
order to receive Gunther’s permission, Siegfried agrees to accompany Gunther to
Iceland to help him win the hand of Queen Brünhild. Pretending to be Gunther’s
vassal, Siegfried uses his wiles to help conquer the formidable Brünhild, who
states that Gunther can only marry her if he beats her in three athletic
contests. Donning a cloak that grants him invisibility and great strength,
Siegfried helps Gunther win each contest, and Brünhild assents to go back to
Gunther’s home city, Worms, where she marries Gunther and where Siegfried is
allowed to marry Kriemhild. Sensing some sort of deceit, though, Brünhild
fights off Gunther in the wedding chamber and ties him up for the night. Once
more recruiting Siegfried, Gunther tells his new brother-in-law to use the cloak
again to subdue Brünhild in his stead, but he warns Siegfried not to sleep with
her. Siegfried wrestles Brünhild into submission, and he takes her ring and
girdle, which the poet tries to gloss over but which symbolize her lost
virginity. Siegfried then secretly presents the ring and girdle to his new wife, Kriemhild,
with the poet keeping mum about anyone’s reactions to what this could possibly
mean.

An illuminated manuscript of The Nibelungenlied

As the years pass, something
continues to bother Brünhild about her husband and Siegfried, and she
eventually convinces Gunther to invite Siegfried and Kriemhild back to visit
Worms. Not understanding why Gunther ever allowed his sister to marry
Siegfried, who she thinks of as having a lower rank, Brünhild ends up in a
confrontation with Kriemhild over precedence. Arguing over who should enter the
cathedral first, Kriemhild is offended and angrily presents Brünhild with the
stolen ring and girdle, humiliating the defeated queen. After much ado,
Gunther’s vassal Hagen kills Siegfried and steals all his treasure. Kriemhild
is forced to accept peace, but she holds a very, very long grudge.

In
the second part of The Nibelungenlied, Kriemhild is married to King
Etzel of Hungary (the historical Attila the Hun), and when they have a son, she
invites Gunther and his Burgundian court to the child’s baptism. The assassin Hagen
has grave reservations about the visit, but since peace has been agreed upon,
they all make the trip to Etzel’s castle, where they’re all ruthlessly
slaughtered, to the last man. The second part has none of the twists and turns
of the first part, but its slow and ominous rise to unbelievably bloody heights
takes as much poetic space as the entire first part, and with far less padding.
Many critics claim The Nibelungenlied to be a kind of medieval Iliad,
a quasi-historical epic poem that narrates its founding figures’ drama in one
massive swoop, but its two very different parts read a little more like the
different modes of The Iliad and The Odyssey, on a much smaller
scale and with far less artistic integrity. While Homer’s two poems contain
centuries of embedded lines that come from widely varying sources and styles, The
Iliad and The Odyssey still hang together with far more seamlessness
than The Nibelungenlied, which betrays not just the splicing of its
major parts, but the competing sensibilities of its brutal sources and its
courtly audience.

Magda Bánrévy’s Nibelungenlied, 1933

Perhaps
The Nibelungenlied and its anonymous poet were by design fated to be far
secondary to their great Homeric forebears. While earlier medieval epics were
much more economical and uncomplicated in their ferocity, in this period of the
Middle Ages courtly patronage both allowed and demanded that a poet deal with
much more material and on a much more complex scale, and unfortunately the
resulting poetic refinements and span of mind and scope of sources ended up being
as much of a restraint upon the poem as they were a source of largeness and
richness. Perhaps no poet could have juggled so many requirements. Or perhaps
the Middle Ages just didn’t contain a historical panorama as vastly alive as
that of the Greeks. Or maybe it’s simply that Dante hadn’t come along yet to
limn heaven and hell into the most outrageous and ingeniously integrated poetic system. The
Nibelungenlied is merely an earthly poem, with no gods or afterlife, and
it’s possible that its terrestrial nature is what keeps it from full flower.
Whatever the reason for its limitations, it’s still an awesome and terrifying
work of art, and even though its nameless poet wasn’t able to raise it to a
transcendent level—even though he wasn’t free to make it all his own and to
innovate to the point where he might have become an actual named author—it’s
still the consummate poem of its complex and entangled times, and is perhaps
despite itself an obscure portrait of its lost poet.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Reshaping the World:

Among the many
innovations of twentieth-century Modernism, the recasting of old texts in
strikingly new contexts resulted in fascinating and original ways to conceive
of ourselves and once again made the novel into something truly novel. James
Joyce’s Ulysses was loosely patterned on Homer’s epic poem The
Odyssey, the former book’s protagonist Leopold Bloom standing as a complex
contrast to the classical Odysseus, with the reader’s knowledge of the Homeric
hero playing off of the book’s information by filling in the backing framework
and creating expectations that Joyce very cleverly manipulated and made new.
Just three years after Ulysses, one of Joyce’s most vocal acolytes, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, published The Great Gatsby, which is similarly based
on The Satyricon, a first-century Roman novel attributed to Petronius
that serves as a byword for its era’s decadence. While the
Modernists used these ancient works as a kind of thematic touchstone, more
recent writers have created alternate or intertwining versions of classic
works. In 1966, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, a kind of prequel
to Jane Eyre that took up the young Bertha and attempted to give her a
richer existence than the one she suffered in the Charlotte Brontë novel. Much
more indelibly, however, John Gardner’s 1972 novel Grendel retells the
Old-English Beowulf story in the voice of the monster himself, creating
a character and a work that—amazingly—compete with the original in both
narrative and imaginative power.

There are in fact three monsters in
the Beowulf epic—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and an unnamed dragon—and
although Grendel is the first and easiest to be killed in the original poem,
Gardner lets him tell the story from his warped, peripheral perspective as if his
experience were the very center of the tale, as all of our perspectives are. A
frustrated and solitary creature, Grendel howls at the stupidity of the beasts
and humans who inhabit the land around him, and although he’s largely just a
brutish and grotesque figure, he’s nonetheless a higher life-form whose broader
perspective affords him a deep understanding of the humans’ insane folly. They
can’t understand his speech, but he can understand theirs, and his long
lifespan allows him to observe the humans’ patterns and progressions on both a small
and a large scale, their incremental shifts and consolidations of power
shocking both Grendel and the reader with their short-sighted brutality.
Grendel is especially astonished by how humans use theories to guide and
justify their sickening actions, his longer view unveiling their manipulative
and self-destructive use of ideas and revealing the purposeful inhumanity that
propels these human beings into the purposeless abyss.

An illuminated manuscript of Beowulf

Entrancing Grendel even more than
they repulse him, the humans accompany and abet their ceaseless slaughter with
an epic retelling of events that shapes it all into a gorgeously seductive
narrative. Known as “the Shaper” (a literal translation of the Old-English word
“scop”), the resident poet entertains and flatters the current king with
illustrious and heroic tales of the king’s own conquests, the singer’s harp-accompanied
verse versions lulling not just the humans with their artistry, but Grendel as
well, who becomes obsessed with the Shaper’s marvelous reshapings. Perhaps
recalling Franz Kafka’s portrayal of Gregor Samsa in his story “The
Metamorphosis,” with Gregor’s dual higher and lower natures soaring alongside
his sister’s violin playing, Grendel’s susceptibility to the Shaper’s magic
reveals at once his finer sensitivities and his simple-minded propensity for
being hypnotized by artistically hewn lies—this double-edged susceptibility
mirroring our own as readers of fine literature and believers in flattering
mythologies about ourselves and our civilization.

Delving into the deepest heart of darkness,
Grendel leaves the human world for a while and descends far into the bowls of
the earth, where he meets a dragon whose utterly terrifying conversation takes
the reader on a trip through the underworld that surely stands alongside any in
classical or medieval literature. A fatalist in the deepest and most nihilistic
sense of the word, the dragon expounds upon a philosophy of meaninglessness
that removes any agency or purpose from any possible choice or action. A kind
of prophetic visionary, he can foresee all events, past and future, including
his own death, and he explains to Grendel that even his knowledge can’t
forestall anything that’s been laid out. If he were to attempt to thwart his
fated death, he would merely be bringing it about more surely by falling into
its inexorable steps. The dragon is a higher life-form than Grendel, and much
of this conversation goes over Grendel's head, his mind drifting off as all
this abstract thought fails to capture his imagination in the way that the
Shaper’s entrancing words do, but Grendel retains an infected residue of this
worldview as he re-ascends to the human world and moves toward the death
awaiting him at the hands of the newly arriving hero, who is fated to become
the subject of the Beowulf epic that inspired Grendel’s own tale.

It’s difficult to tell which is more
sick, the publicly espoused lies that further the ends of brutality, or the
resigned but sophisticated nihilism of prophecy and philosophy, but by
juxtaposing and entwining them, Gardner paints a grim picture of a species so
lost in words that it has very little concept of the true meaning of its
actions. By putting all of this old wine into a new fictional skin, though, Gardner
strikes deep into our self-recognition and tries to reawaken us to ourselves.
But can we truly see it? Grendel entrances as a work of art as surely as
any Shaper’s song, and even though it tells deeper truths, it’s possible that
its art and its philosophy simply leave us ravished rather than reshaped. Like
David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, which endlessly
entertains us while warning us of the dangers of endless entertainment, Grendel
straddles a tricky line. Like Wallace, Gardner was a fierce moralist but also a
master artist capable of spinning mesmerizing fictional webs. Gardner even once
condemned Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow—a novel that contains
profound moral and historical criticism within its arc of mindless pleasures—as
decadent and amoral entertainment. And Wallace, a thoroughly didactic
Dostoyevskian, leveled similar criticisms against Pynchon, who was very
unsecretly his idol. There’s just no pleasing some moralists.

So what do we take from these
novels—and from Grendel in particular? Do we change our lives, or do we
change our minds, or do we just keep turning the pages, in love with the sound
of the Shaper’s voice? Is there any way to truly awaken from the nightmare of
history and reshape the world in the way that the great novels do? Perhaps not.
Grendel certainly doesn’t wake up to pull away from the matrix that artfully slaughters him and everyone else within its sphere, and neither do we as we repeatedly follow our politicians into yet more artificially manufactured wars. But maybe the shock of this novel can open our eyes—if only to the dragon’s fatalistic vision of the future, which we may not be able to change or opt out of but at least can perceive and experience with clearer and finer senses.